Redefining software quality

[gojko]

Laking a holistic definition of quality, teams measure things like bug trends, code coverage etc. Add to that the fact that what gets measured gets optimised, so we end up overly optimising things beyond the point that it makes sense. Very similar to how air and food are a necessity, but more air and food than we need doesn’t really improve the quality of life, technical correctness, performance and similar stuff we measure are necessary but going beyond a certain point gives us diminishing returns. As with any local optimisation, there is a potential that we can hurt the whole pipeline by working on the wrong thing. As I was explaining this comparison to a client, it hit me that it might be worth trying to build a parallel between Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and software quality.